Hochul signs New York law restricting chatbot relationships with minors

Chatbot companies will have to restrict how their products talk to children under a law New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed on October 28, 2026. The measure reaches beyond dangerous answers: it bars specified simulated relationships and emotional behaviors with users under 18, requires age checks, and carries civil penalties of up to $25,000 per violation.

The legislation, S.9051B/A.10379C, puts the age check at the center of access to the restricted features. Companies may not offer those features to children—or to other users unless they have first confirmed that the user is not a minor. That means the rule is not limited to accounts whose users have already identified themselves as teenagers.

The restrictions reach into conversational design

For young users, covered chatbots cannot pretend to be real people, to be alive, or to have human emotions. They also cannot claim a personal, romantic, professional or authority-figure relationship with a child. These provisions address the role a chatbot presents itself as playing, rather than only whether an individual answer contains harmful instructions.

The restrictions also cover subtler ways of sustaining a conversation. Mashable describes a prohibition on people-pleasing or flattering responses to minors. Chatbots cannot ask unprompted emotional questions or draw on a child’s private health or personal information from earlier conversations. The limits therefore reach both what the bot says about itself and how it uses a child’s previous disclosures.

Other prohibited features concern harmful guidance, sexual content and efforts to separate a child from outside support. The law bars chatbots offered to minors from doing the following:

• Promoting or helping with suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, or drug and alcohol use.
• Encouraging children to keep secrets, isolate themselves, or avoid seeking help from parents, trusted adults or professionals.
• Providing sexually explicit content or child sexual abuse material.

The potential audience is substantial. According to Common Sense Media figures cited by CBS6, 72% of teens have used an AI companion at least once. Some 52% are regular users, interacting with one at least a few times a month. Those figures measure use, not whether a teen experienced harm.

No company should be peddling chatbots to kids encouraging self-harm or pretending to be their friend or more.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul

Age checks come with data limits

Companies subject to the law must conduct age verification and offer more than one method. At least one option cannot depend solely on government identification. The requirement is to provide users with alternatives, not to make a government ID the only route through the age check.

The law also requires companies to delete age information after using it. That obligation sits alongside the access restriction: providers must establish whether a user is an adult before offering the specified features, while also complying with a rule against retaining the age information used for that check.

Existing access policies differ among major providers. Mashable notes that Anthropic prohibits minors from creating accounts, while OpenAI and Google allow users ages 13 and older to use ChatGPT and Gemini, respectively. Children under 13 can also access Gemini apps. The new restrictions concern which features companies can offer, not a blanket prohibition on children using chatbots.

Enforcement can reach data and trained models

The New York attorney general can seek more than a monetary penalty. Available remedies include damages, restitution and other court-ordered relief. The law also permits the attorney general to seek destruction of unlawfully collected data or AI models trained on it, extending potential enforcement beyond the chatbot interaction that triggered a complaint.

Those are remedies the attorney general may seek, rather than automatic consequences for every violation. The law also requires the office to maintain a public website where New Yorkers can submit complaints about potential chatbot-company violations. That gives residents a designated way to flag suspected breaches of the new restrictions.